Ronald Hale was admitted to Edmonton’s Royal Alexandra Hospital with complications following lung surgery. The 74-year-old retired mine manager died days later, his body overwhelmed by a nightmarish bacterium from half a world away.

An Alberta woman, who had been in a rickshaw accident in India, had carried the microbe home and it got loose in the Royal Alex. Hale became infected and died when he could not fight off the microbe, which has acquired the biochemical machinery to evade nearly all antibiotics on the shelf.

While still rare in Canada, Britain and the U.S. are both struggling to contain these alarming microbes, which could spell the end of the antibiotic miracle.

Leading health officials are warning of a “catastrophic” threat, and Canadian doctors are calling for action to prevent the organisms from taking hold here.

Trevor Lawley keeps hundreds of samples of C. difficile in his freezer, each identified by the country in which the bacterium unleashed its unique brand of misery and death.

He tracked down Aus001 in Melbourne, Australia; collected Gla010 in Glasgow, Scotland; and picked up Lei017 in the Netherlands as part of an international hunt for the origin of “epidemic” C. difficile – a global menace that pumps toxins into the guts of its victims. It has spread around the world’s hospitals in the last decade, killing thousands.

Lawley, a Canadian with a flair for microbial forensics who now works at a leading British research centre, spent two years travelling the globe collecting hundreds of samples of C. difficile.

Then, in his lab at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, Lawley and his colleagues extracted the bacteria’s secrets.

Two strains of antibiotic resistant C. difficile that emerged in North America caused the global epidemic, the sleuths report.

One emerged in the northeast U.S. a decade ago; the second, which they call FQR2, surfaced in Quebec.

Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe, Associate Professor, Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Guelph, explains the function of ‘roboguts’ in her lab at the Science Complex.PHOTO: (ADAM GAGNON FOR POSTMEDIA NEWS)

Published November, 12, 2013

GUELPH, Ont. – Emma Allen-Vercoe and her graduate students have come to appreciate the unmistakable odour that hits when you enter their laboratory.

“When we walk in and don’t smell anything, that’s when we begin to worry,” says Allen-Vercoe, a microbial ecologist who has spent almost a decade at the University of Guelph studying what most people can’t wait to flush down the toilet.

Feces provide a window on the vast community of bacteria, fungi and viruses living in the human gut, an ecosystem Allen-Vercoe finds more intriguing than anything in the tropical rain forests or world’s oceans. “It’s the most diverse and densely populated ecosystem on Earth,“ she says.

The human “microbiota” or “microbiome,” as the trillions of organisms are collectively known, is critical to good health. And the microbes do a lot more than help digest food. Mounting evidence indicates they also offer protection against asthma, pathogens, allergies, diabetes and perhaps even certain forms of autism and cancer.

Celine Edelmann, who had a fecal transplant last year, a treatment for her chronic C.diff infection, poses in her home in Montreal (CHRISTINNE MUSCHI PHOTO FOR POSTMEDIA NEWS)

Published November 12, 2013

MONTREAL – Céline Edelmann was on a Buddhist retreat in a secluded cabin in northern Vermont when her intestines began to act up.

There was no phone, no electricity and no running water. “I was in the woods alone,” says the soft-spoken Montreal psychologist, who had been looking forward to the eight-day retreat, unplugged from city life.

She assumed the gut upset would pass. But after countless trips to the outhouse, Edelmann knew something was seriously wrong.

By the fifth day she was so weak she worried she wouldn’t have the strength to go for help. Edelmann packed up her things and made the 20-minute hike through the woods back to the retreat’s main centre.

By nightfall, she was in isolation again – this time in a Montreal hospital being treated by nurses in protective gloves and gowns.

A virulent strain of the bacteria Clostridium difficile, or C. diff. as it’s often called, had infected and inflamed her colon. She soon found herself on a medical odyssey – with a surprising ending.